Traditional microwave ovens usually comprise a single cooking chamber in which a food item “to be heated”, or “to be reheated”, is placed. The number of meals that can be prepared at the same time in such traditional microwave ovens is however limited and, for most users, not sufficient. In traditional microwave ovens having a single cooking chamber, reheating of a ready meal for a family of e.g. four persons can take a lot of time (up to twenty minutes depending on the type of dishes) and, in addition, the four dishes are ready successively, i.e. not at the same time. There is therefore a general need for microwave ovens in which it is possible to prepare several dishes at the same time and more rapidly.
In for example U.S. Pat. No. 5,796,082, a microwave oven including a cooking chamber in which a plurality of removable horizontal partition plates are mounted to divide the cooking chamber into vertically adjacent compartments is disclosed. In this prior art, a tray is rotatably mounted on each partition plate and a drive shaft carries vertically spaced drive elements, such as friction wheels or gears, which are engageable with respective trays. The trays become disengaged from the drive elements in response to being removed from the cooking chamber. An additional driven tray is mounted on a floor of the cooking chamber. Such a prior art microwave oven relies on dispersing the microwaves by the rotation of a tray provided to each one of the cooking compartments. A drawback of such prior art is the need of turntables and rotating parts, which increase the complexity and cost of the apparatus. Further, such prior art microwave ovens do not provide a satisfactory heating evenness in each one of the cooking chambers.
Thus, there is a need for providing new apparatus and methods that would address at least some of the above mentioned issues.